abolitionist perspective(s),
resistance of criminalization in the lives of Black women and gender expansive people. What alternatives to criminalization are possible according to these perspectives? What might be their function and impact? What might be the challenges?
ASSIGNMENT WEIGHT: 30%. SUBMISSION: The final take-home exam must be uploaded to Blackboard at or before the time specified above. Late exams will not be accepted. Feedback will not be provided on the exam, only a grade. SPECIFICATIONS: Choose one of the three options below and prepare an essay on your chosen topic. Exams should be written in proper essay format: an introduction clearly stating which option you are addressing and your thesis statement; body paragraphs with 3-4 key points that support your thesis; and a conclusion summarizing your key points and offering concluding thoughts (new information should not be introduced in the conclusion). Students are expected to critically examine the topic of their choice and apply the theories and concepts examined in the course. Be sure to proofread! Completed exams should be 6-7 pages double-spaced (with only one space between lines and paragraphs), not including the full reference list. Exams should be typed in 12-point Times New Roman font, with 1″ margins. Exams must include in-text citations and a reference list. All citations must be according to APA. Do not include sources in your reference list that you have not cited in the body of your essay and vice versa. Quotes must be cited with a corresponding page/paragraph number and should be kept to a minimum. Title page is not required but can be used. If not using a title page, please include your full name, student number, and course code in the header and/or footer. Exams must be developed using at least six (6) course materials listed in the syllabus (required or suggested) or shared in a module, and a minimum of two (2) lectures (by instructor or guest), for a total of at least eight (8) sources. External sources should not be used. Exams that do not meet these specifications will receive a reduced grade.
Please use these notes an information for these notes
module 1 notes
FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY
How we understand crime and criminality is very limited to specific interpretations of harm, violence, and punishment • Consequences of interpretations: • Criminalize and marginalize racialized, disabled, classed, and stigmatized people. • Deflect from the crimes of the powerful and of systems/institutions • Feminist criminology introduces gendered lens and allows us to question and disrupt status quo • Not a singular lens
FOUCAULT’S POSTSTRUCTURALISM
Michel Foucault, French philosopher (1926-1984) • Power is fluid, not possessed; power is everywhere • Different types of power: e.g., biopower, pastoral, disciplinary, governmentality • Power operates through consent • Criminology – knowledge of crime and punishment becomes normalized; shaped not only by the state but by everyone and through social/power relations • Because power is decentralized, points of resistance can also be found everyhwere
NEOLIBERALISM
Principles of deregulation, privatization, individualism, and austerity • Rise of neoliberalism in 1970s/80s – social conditions worsened but problems were individualized • Contradictory support for shrinking state (role in economic, social conditions) but increased carceral and military strategies • 1990s, more women, especially Black and Indigenous, being incarcerated • Cuts to social, financial, and health supports, services, and resources are tied to criminalization of women
THE ROLE OF THE STATE
Important to examine the role of the state in oppression, marginalization, and criminalization • Asking important questions about the role of the state in women’s relationship to carcerality, coupled with political action • Not only “how” but “why” and “what now”? • Poststructural approaches have been critiqued for minimizing the role of the state and stopping at action, but closer reading suggests that the state has a role to play, and political action is possible/necessary
MOVING FORWARD
Deconstruct crime, criminality, and criminalization • Centralize experiences of women and gender expansive people, particularly those who are racialized, stigmatized, and marginalized • Build up critical theoretical foundations • Move away from essentialized, universal, and mainstream accounts of criminality and victimhood • Understand crime and criminality as constitutive of and constituted by certain power relations • Crime and criminality are not inevitable or natural categories • Study the state as a source of crime and criminality, and hold the state and state actors accountable
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
What are your ideas about how society defines and responds to crime,
how that intersects with gender, race, and class? • Where do you locate crime – for example, in individuals, in systems, in institutions, in power relations, combination?
• How do you understand harm and how does that relate to your thoughts about crime, criminality, and criminalization?
• How do you understand your social responsibility to reduce such harm?
module 2 notes
ABOLITION
Led by black, queer, trans, marginalized people with direct experiences of interpersonal, state, and structural violence • Nestled in anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist Black feminist principles • Stems from advocacy and campaigns to support women experiencing violence, fight against cuts to domestic and sexual violence services, and offer alternatives to inadequate and harmful state responses • Angela Davis: “imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society” (Terwiel, 2020, p. 431)
WHY ABOLITION?
Investments into carceral systems have not contributed to shifts in crime or criminality. Even when crime rates are going down, carceral budgets are going up. Funding simultaneously goes down for social services, supports, and resources • Carceral systems are currently failing to protect people, women and gender expansive people in particular, from violence • A woman is killed by a partner in Canada every six days; less than ten percent of all sexual assaults are reported to police; trans people are targeted for violence; Black women comprise the majority of homicide victims • Police and courts are ineffective at responding to and preventing gender-based violence and sexual assault • Race, class, immigration status, ability, gender, sexuality, and other identifiers/intersections play an important role in how law enforcement and incarceration are applied. Racialized people are incarcerated, experience police stops and violence, and surveilled at higher rates • Abolitionist politics considers carcerality and carceral systems as systems of violence and punishment as opposed to protection, safety, and accountability, calling for alternative ways to ensure protection, safety, and accountability • At the same time, abolition is also resistance to how gender, race, class, and so on are organized and governed; it’s a call to live outside those norms and possibilities
“CARCERAL FEMINISM”
Generally used to refer to a feminism that validates carceral methods of punishment, such as criminalization, policing, surveillance, prosecution, imprisonment • Referred to by Elizabeth Bernstein in work on anti-trafficking campaigns – described as result of collusion between neoliberal and neoconservative politics • Rejecting this type of carceral feminism would require multileveled approach that includes moving away from carceral punishment-based measures (e.g., criminalization, policing, incarceration) along with commitment to economic, gender, and racial justice, interrogation of unfounded moral order claims, alternatives to free-market solutions, etc.\ • More recently, carceral feminism has been reduced by some to a framework focused only on carceral punishment without its more complex discursive and theoretical underpinnings
“ANTI-CARCERAL FEMINISM”
With “carceral feminism” a complex concept, “anti-carceral feminism” also comes in different forms • Some advocate for move away from criminal legal approaches altogether, including laws, courts, police, surveillance, and prisons, advocating instead for community-based accountability and justice processes • With inequitable court outcomes along race, class, gender, and ability, rising incarceration rates amongst racialized people, and police violence, they recognize law, courts, the prison system, and police institutions as sites of violence, abuse, and other forms of harm. Efforts that rely on these systems, they argue, serve to reinforce and propel these harms
Recognizes that some feminist efforts, particularly those steeped in neoliberal and neoconservative politics, have coopted radical grassroots anti-violence agendas that otherwise offer alternative ways to responding to sexual and physical violence and relied on carceral measures instead • Involves intersectional lens, with consideration for intersecting systems of oppression and domination • Sceptical of feminisms that do not question such intersections/power dynamics • Advocates for alternative approaches, mostly community-based, to understanding, mitigating, and responding to harm
A CONTINUUM?
Continuum of decarceration rather than binary of carceral versus anti-carceral, with ultimate goal of abolition of prisons, police, and other carceral systems • Some argue that while we dismantle carcerality and work towards abolition, survivors of violence require recourse from the criminal legal system, mostly through legislative and policy reform • “We see a vision of abolition that strategically enlists civil or criminal legal systems to address immediate concerns while engaging in a longer-term project of transforming communities to decrease both the prevalence of sexual violence and the perceived need for prisons” (Terwiel, 2020, p. 434)
Continuum of decarceration would entail: • Legal reform to hold abusers accountable and improve conditions for survivors of violence • Simultaneously understanding violence as structural/systemic/institutional • Not romanticizing communities • Recognizing role of the state in instituting change and making rights claims and demands, while naming and disrupting punitive approaches to justice
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
Can we think of how rights claims might be sufficient or insufficient? For example, are rights claims enough to change material conditions? • What are the differences between anti-carceral and continuum of decarceration approaches? How do they overlap? • Another way to think about that is – if the ultimate goal of both approaches is abolition, which of their positions might we consolidate? Which cannot be consolidated?
COURSE MATERIAL to use:
[Haymarket Books]. (2022, February 4). Abolition. Feminism. Now [Video]. YouTube. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/408-abolition-feminism-now (watch video from beginning to end)
Terwiel, A. (2020). What is carceral feminism? Political Theory, 48(4), 421-442.
Suggested
Bernstein, E. (2010). Militarized humanitarianism meets carceral feminism: The politics of sex, rights, and freedom in contemporary antitrafficking campaigns. Signs, 36(1), 45-71.
Masson, A. (2020). A critique of anti-carceral feminism. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21(3), 64-76.
Mooney, J. (2020). Feminism: Redressing the gender imbalance. The theoretical foundations of criminology: Place, time and context (pp. 219-266). Routledge.
Balfour, G. (2006). Re-imagining a feminist criminology. Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 48(5), 736-752.